In The Necropolis
In the cemetery of Beit She’arim
inside a tomb from the third century
paved with mosaic
and decorated with wildlife reliefs
is carved an inscription
commemorating a local resident.
The author, though Jewish, had a Greek style:
I lie, son of Leontius dead, son of Sappho,
who after having gathered of the fruit
of all wisdom left the light.
Woe is me, in my Beit She’arim.
After having gone to Hades,
I, Justus, lie here with many of my relatives
for that is what powerful fate has decreed.
Be consoled, Justus. No one is immortal.
Dark is the house without windows.
Dust is the only weather in the tomb.
Indifferent as a reflecting moon,
a green moth flitted over the stone,
then lay for a long moment on the ground.
~
From the Cairo Genizah
Documents and manuscripts
containing God’s name
couldn’t be destroyed in the usual way.
For a thousand years,
the Egyptian Jews of Fustat
put their old Bibles, prayer books,
and law codes in a hiding place
in Ben Ezra synagogue,
along with shopping lists, business records,
marriage contracts, divorce deeds,
fables and philosophy,
medical books and magical amulets,
and letters by the thousands.
But what was written
did not stay buried.
Eight hundred years later,
in a library in New York,
an old man touched a letter
written by Maimonides,
and he did not court disaster
as superstition predicted
but on the contrary was infused
with so much energy
it buoyed him up
and he practically floated
out the front door
of the library on 122nd Street,
walking as if propelled,
with the gait of a young man,
all the way downtown
to Times Square.
_______
Anne Whitehouse is the author of poetry collections: The Surveyor’s Hand, Blessings and Curses, The Refrain, Meteor Shower, Outside from the Inside, and Steady, as well as the art chapbooks, Surrealist Muse (about Leonora Carrington), Escaping Lee Miller, Frida, Being Ruth Asawa, and Adrienne Fidelin Restored. She is the author of a novel, Fall Love.